Anti-spam policy

If you have been a victim of spam (unsolicited commercial email), you will find our position below in addition to some ways in which you can confront spam-related problems.

1. Correctly identify the spam's origin

Do you think Gandi is responsible for the spam?

The sender or the recipient of the spam has an address ending with …@gandi.net: spammers often use fake names. Gandi does not spam, does not maintain a list of its customers for spammers and does not sell such lists to third parties. The addresses in the “To” and “From” fields are simply faked, and definitely do not mean that Gandi created or sent the spam. To find the real sender, you need to look at all the emails' “headers” and examine this information using the available tools on the Stopspam website.

By following one of the links in the spam you received, you came to an error page saying that the domain name is registered by Gandi and uses our default servers.

You see names such as redir-mail-telehouse1.gandi.net in the “Received” field of the spam, and think that Gandi has open relays: Gandi does not have open relays. We are very diligent in checking this constantly. If the Spam was relayed by one of our servers, this means it was sent by an email address on one of our domains, using one of our free forwarding services. Email from this domain was therefore received by our servers and then relayed to the address specified by the domain's owner.

By looking up the domain name displayed in the email, you see the domain is registered with Gandi: As an accredited registrar for each TLD's authorities (ICANN for example), Gandi registers domain names on behalf of its customers. The use of a domain name purchased from us depends on the person that owns it and/or its contacts, visible in the Whois at
https://www.gandi.net/whois/.
However, in some cases we can take direct action against the domain name.

2. What can I do to fight spam?

You can file a complaint with the Internet service provider or web host used by the spammer, in the hope that they might deactivate their email account or website. We cannot take any action in this regard, but if you have difficulties in identifying the Internet access provider or web host of the spammer, please feel free to contact us, we will do our best to help you identify them.

Protect your email address:
If you have your own domain name, your contact information can be found in the Whois database; your email address is therefore also available through the Whois: it is a good idea to protect this address by enabling anti-spam protection in your Account Management page (free service).

3. What more can Gandi do?

Gandi is only a technical intermediary in the registration of domain names. However, this does not mean that Gandi encourages or condones spam. It is quite the opposite. This only means that our position as a Registrar limits what we can and cannot do about it. We can only modify, suspend, or delete a domain if:

The spam was sent through our forwarding service:
such a practice hinders the smooth operation of our technical and general services by taxing our IT system and/or by generating many complaints by third parties, and is grounds for the suspension or termination of forwarding services, or even the deletion of the domain name (Sections 14 and 19 of Gandi’s General Terms and Conditions of Domain Name Registration).

Personal contact information in the Whois is invalid:
As with any ICANN-accredited registrar, Gandi must assure that the information present in the Whois is valid. If you think the information provided in the Whois is incorrect for a domain name tied to spam you have received, please contact us through our free Complaint for Inaccurate Whois page. If the information on the offending website is not updated within 15 days, the domain will be put on hold. If the contact information is clearly false, the domain will then be put on hold immediately (Sections 16 and 19 of Gandi’s General Terms and Conditions of Domain Name Registration).

Gandi protects your email address
If you believe your spammed email address was found in Gandi's whois, you can enable an "anti-spam system" in your account. It's free, harmless and can be reversed: you will still receive some spam, but the encryption system used will nevertheless reduce it significantly.

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